ASHLEY PAUL, MATANA ROBERTS & YONI SILVER
Et tournent les Sons dans la Garrigue (September 1977)
And turn the Sounds in the Scrubland
Reflection on the writing No. 1
Tuesday 12 February 2019, 7.30pm
AINE O'DWYER & GRAHAM LAMBKIN
Unheimlich Schön (Very Beautiful, 1971)
— 20 minutes
Stereo magnetic tape
Production: Hörspiel S.W.F., Baden-Baden (in German)
CD Metamkine, KCD008 — 1993
“How does a young woman breathe when her mind is elsewhere...” – Luc Ferrari
ASHLEY PAUL, MATANA ROBERTS & YONI SILVER
Et tournent les Sons dans la Garrigue (September 1977)
And turn the Sounds in the Scrubland
Reflection on the writing No. 1
This piece of music is a proposal more than a composition.
It is about the communication between the musicians who choose to carry it out or “to invent it”.
What is proposed is a score of intentions or of sound desires, a tape indicating musical matters and a shape as well as general ideas that must give a direction.
I found some sentences written at the time of work and which seem me to locate without too much specifying the intentions of this composition and to put the musicians in a psychological climate incitant them to imagination:
“… These last summers, I made prolonged stations in the scrubland of Corbières. I dozed there without really sleeping during the hot hours of the day. This half-sleep (or the abandonment of the conscience in the first degree) impregnated me with this place with which I entered in complicity. An silence inhabited of small more or less defined sounds, perfumes of lavender and thyme, the hardness of the stones and thistles, air moving in the pine needles whose noise evokes that of the caresses on the curves of a large body.
(“What have you made today?” I was asked, and I answered, “I worked in the scrubland”)
The soft and violent scrubland of complex and unspecified sensuality located its universe in difference with the remainder of the landscape, I recognized its time suspended as forms and durations of gestures of love… “
O’Dwyer is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is informed by both the conceptual concerns of sound art and traditional composition techniques, embracing the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment. She has created works for large-scale and intimate settings that allow for both planned and unplanned compositions to co-exist in live situ. Recent works include 'Poems for Daedalus’ , a series of site-specific performances developed in Athens 2018; the book 'Poems for play', a collection of scores for a Jesuit monastery; 'Accompaniment for Captives’ , a performance for two fishing boats; 'Performance for Live Stream' (Cafe OTO, 2021), an audio-visual work; 'Song of Place' (2022) a street opera staged in Bristol suburbia and ‘Sing in the Dark’ ( 2024 ) a live vocal performance for acousmonium.
https://aineodwyer.bandcamp.com/
Graham Lambkin (b. 1973) is a London based multidisciplinary artist and publisher whose work embraces audio, visual and text-based concerns. Lambkin was a founding member of the seminal English underground group The Shadow Ring who between 1992-2002 explored the possibilities of fusing amateur folk music, cracked electronics and surreal wordplay into a unique and unsettling hybrid that continues to exert an influence today. Following the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a run of critically acclaimed solo recordings including Salmon Run (2007), Amateur Doubles (2011) and Community (2016) as well as a series of collaborative projects with the likes of Joe McPhee, Keith Rowe, Moniek Darge, Michael Pisaro and Áine O'Dwyer. Lambkin was also the founder of the Kye label who between 2001-2016 published over 60 new audio works by artists as diverse of Philip Corner, Gabi Losoncy, Vanessa Rossetto and Malcolm Goldstein as well as significant archival collections by Anton Heyboer, Moniek Darge, Joe McPhee and Henning Christiansen.
As a performer Lambkin has appeared internationally, presenting work at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Kitchen, NY, New Museum Brooklyn, NY, CALarts, CA, Sibelius Museum, Turku, I.C.A. London, Cafe OTO, London, Arts Centre, Melbourne and Fylkingen, Stockholm.
Lambkin's visual art explores the metamorphic properties of the drawing medium in which the abstract and the figurative perpetually shape-shift across contrasting visual planes, thereby undermining the expected categories of image content. These works have been exhibited internationally in five solo shows to date, most recently Time Runs Through the Darkest Hour at Blank Forms, NY. Lambkin has seen eight volumes of visual/text based work published to date, chiefly through Penultimate Press, Berlin/London, and has also produced graphic work for a range of artists including The Dead C, Harry Pussy, Splintered and Double Leopards.
Lambkin's much anticipated new release Aphorisms (2023) has just been published via Blank Forms, following their archival 4xLP boxset Solos (2021), and looks ahead to the extensive 12CD box/book anthologising the complete works of The Shadow Ring later this year. In addition Lambkin is readying for the release of Gondolas 2CD (2023), a collaboration with James Rushford via Erstwhile.
Ashley Paul is an American performer and composer based in London. She uses an array of instruments including saxophone, clarinet, voice, guitar, bells and percussion, mixing disparate elements to create a colorful palate of sound that works its way into her intuitive songs; free forming, introverted melodies. This blend manifests beautiful and simple musical forms against acoustic experimentation.
Ashley has performed or recorded with Phill Niblock, Rashad Becker, Nik Colk Void, Loren Connors, Heatsick, Aki Onda, C. Spencer Yeh, Anthony Coleman, Bass Clef, Joe Maneri, Joe Morris, Seijiro Murayama, Greg Kelley, Bill Nace and Eli Keszler appearing on such labels as Important, PAN, ESP-DISK’ and Tzadik. She received a Masters of Music from New England Conservatory in 2007.
